Theater of War, Part 2

 

[One of the things that has interested me in my reading about Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War and their work is the way the script-writer and artistic director selects a specific play from the classic repertoire for each problem he wants to address. 

[Then he creates the reading text himself—he was schooled as a classicist and translator—to suit the issue so that it’ll bring out the crux of each situation he wants his audience, made up of members of the community who suffer the most directly from the specific conflict—nurses, for instance, and the burn-out they experienced during the two-year pandemic brought on by the corona virus. 

[I’m starting with another look at the readings of Henrik Ibsen’s An Emeny of the People this year, and then I’ll work backwards chronologically and look at other crises handled by other plays.  There are four articles from various publications in Part 2 below.

[I should point out to readers who haven’t seen Part 1 (posted on 22 June) that it begins with a brief backgrounder of the company and some of its aims and tactics.  It might be worth your while to go back now, before reading Part 2, and read that profile (as well as the two other pieces posted in that first installment).]

“AN ENEMY OF THE
PEOPLE ENCOURAGES COMMUNITY DIALOGUE”
by Dorothy Yaqub 

[Part 1 of this series of posts on Theater of War focused largely on the reading of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People as a way to examine the dilemma of the public health professionals' apparent conflict with the general population, most notably during the COVID pandemic. 

[I’m starting off my coverage of some of the other conflicts Bryan Doerries and his troupe confronted with other plays and texts with another look at the Ibsen reading by Dorothy Yaqub from the Kenyon Collegian of 11 April 2024.  The Kenyon Collegian is the official student newspaper of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.]

Bryan Doerries ’98 co-founded Theater of War Productions in 2009 with a specific goal in mind. “We present readings and performances of seminal texts to create the conditions for dialogue about challenging and sometimes divisive, hard-to-discuss issues,” he told the audience gathered in Oden Auditorium [at Kenyon College] on Sunday afternoon [14 April 2024]. It was the second of two staged readings of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, which Doerries himself adapted and directed [see Part 1, 22 June 2024]. The first performance was staged the previous night at the Knox Memorial Theater in Mount Vernon [Ohio].

The original version of An Enemy of the People is a lengthy play. Its five acts tell the story of Thomas Stockmann, a doctor in a small Norwegian town who discovers that the local water supply is contaminated. When Stockmann tries to alert the community to this crisis, he is scapegoated and shunned. Doerries’ adaptation features only the third and fourth acts of the play, which depict the doctor’s decision to call a town meeting about the contamination and the meeting itself, where Stockmann is shouted down by the townspeople. [I inserted a note about the play and its background in the first section of Part 1 of this serial post.]

The cast featured a diverse array of figures, ranging from professional actors (David Strathairn of “Nomadland”) to Mount Vernon public officials (Mayor Matthew T. Starr) to a Kenyon student (Osose Omofomah ’26) — there was even a cameo from President Julie Kornfeld [of Kenyon College]. However, the official performers were far from the only participants. During the scene of the town meeting, the audience was encouraged to take on the role of local attendees, shouting their opinions and heckling the doctor. Omofomah praised this element of the production in an email to the Collegian: “I thought it was really intriguing to observe the audience’s reactions change and evolve as the play wore on.”

After the performance concluded, the actors were replaced by a group of five panelists, with different community members composing the Saturday and Sunday panels. Each panelist briefly introduced themselves and shared their thoughts on An Enemy of the People’s modern-day relevance. Following these statements, Doerries turned the discussion over to the audience. Both in-person and Zoom attendees took turns asking questions and sharing their own insights about the play.

One topic that was clearly on everyone’s mind was public health. In a post-pandemic world, the town folks’ scapegoating of the doctor reminded audience members of COVID-19 denialism. They also discussed a variety of social issues, including access to clean drinking water and breakdown of democracy. “I’ve seen this three times now, and what struck me today was mob rule,” one attendee said. “It’s so terrifying, and we’re seeing it today in this country.”

This was just one of the many passionate testimonials that audience members shared. The panelists responded to each person thoughtfully, so even though the topics of discussion were serious, the dialogue session felt positive and productive. “I really enjoyed being a part of such a visceral and powerful experience for everyone involved, including the other actors on the panel and the audience who were constantly challenging us in our performances,” Omofomah reflected. Although An Enemy of the People’s protagonist may not have succeeded in his mission to save the town, Doerries certainly succeeded in his mission to create community dialogue.

[Dorothy Yaqub (Kenyon College class of 2026) is a journalist for the Kenyon Collegian, focusing on local news and events in Gambier, Ohio.  Her articles cover a range of topics including arts and culture, student organizations, and community events.  Yaqub aims to provide readers with engaging and informative stories that highlight the vibrant and diverse community at Kenyon College.] 

*  *  *  *
“A CONFLICT-THEATRE TROUPE
VISITS A LAND OF STRIFE (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)”
by Eric Lach 

[The New Yorker posted Eric Lach’s look at the very current—and thorny—problem of student demonstrations from opposite perspectives on the Israeli war in Gaza on 4 March 2024.]

Theater of War productions tries [sic] to create a dialogue about Israel and Palestine through the Iliad and “The Trojan Women.”

The director and translator Bryan Doerries stood by the stage in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre the other night, watching an audience of students, faculty, and alumni file in. Since 2006, Doerries, who founded Theater of War Productions, has put on performances in locations riven by trauma and strife: military bases, prisons, gang-dominated neighborhoods, opioid-gripped towns. An Ivy League campus in 2024 was as volatile a venue as his troupe had encountered. Since October 7th, Columbia has been wrenched by protests, rage, and grief, with students, faculty, and alumni drawing rhetorical battle lines in support of either Israel or Palestine—yet Doerries expressed no trepidation. “In our form, the whole point is that the audience is the main character,” he said. “What Theater of War does for institutions is create conditions for dialogue that they couldn’t create for themselves.”

Three hundred and forty people had R.S.V.P.’d. College I.D.s were checked at the door. Doerries had chosen to present two passages from ancient Greek literature: Book VI of the Iliad, when the doomed Trojan warrior Hector bids farewell to both his wife, Andromache, and his young son, Astyanax; and the climax of Euripides’ [480-ca. 406 BCE] “The Trojan Women” [415 BCE], in which the freshly widowed Andromache is informed that a victorious Greek war council, led by Odysseus, has decided to execute her son, raze her city, and cart her off into slavery. The texts were Doerries’s translations. “If the dating is correct,” he said, “then the audience that originally watched ‘The Trojan Women’ would have been a militarized democracy that had just committed the kinds of atrocities, on the island of Melos, as the characters in the play.” After the performance, Doerries would lead a discussion. “We read something,” he said. “And then we break it open.”

[The Siege of Melos (according to Wikipedia): “During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) between Athens and Sparta, the Melians made some small donations to the Spartan war effort, but remained largely neutral despite sharing the Spartans’ Dorian ethnicity. In 426 BC, the Athenians raided the Melian countryside, and the following year demanded tribute, but Melos refused. In the summer of 416 BC, Athens invaded again with 3,400 men, and demanded that Melos ally with them against Sparta, or be destroyed. The Melians rejected this, so the Athenian army laid siege to the city and eventually captured it in the winter. After the city’s fall, the Athenians executed all the adult men, and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island.”]

From his spot beside the stage, Doerries waved at Clémence Boulouque, a professor of Jewish and Israel studies, who had helped plan the performance. She took a seat in the auditorium. Boulouque is a member of the university’s task force on antisemitism; the group’s records are being sought by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The night’s turnout encouraged her. The production had been placed on a boycott list by the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, a student group spurred, in part, by the university’s decision to suspend two other groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, both of which had been protesting the Israeli military’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza. “This is the reality here now,” Boulouque said. A few moments before the performance began, Minouche Shafik, the president of the university, sat down near Boulouque.

Doerries, who has a bushy beard and was wearing a black ball cap, introduced the players—five professional actors and seven students. The actors included the Tony winner Lois Smith, the Obie winner Elizabeth Marvel, and Glenn Davis, an artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The seven students, several of whom identified as Jewish or Arab, played the chorus. An eighth chorus member had got nervous and dropped out. The actors sat at a long table draped in black cloth. For an hour, they read their lines with blunt emotion.

[I’ve seen many of Lois Smith’s performances and reported on them on this blog.  See “The Illusion,” 1 July 2011; “Heartless,” 10 September 2012; “The Trip to Bountiful,” 25 May 2013; “The Old Friends,” 10 October 2013; and “John,” 1 September 2015.]

“I would prefer to be dead, the earth piled high above my remains, than to hear your blood-curdling screams as they drag you away,” Davis (Hector) told Marvel (Andromache).

“Oh, dearest women,” Smith (Hector’s mother, Hecuba) said. “The gods, the gods—all this time they only wished to see us suffer. So great was their hatred for Troy.”

When the readings were done, the professionals exited the stage, leaving the student chorus. Doerries appeared with a microphone and floated around the audience, collecting responses. “It’s as if nothing will be left of Troy,” a member of the chorus, who identified himself as Palestinian and Egyptian, said, kicking off the conversation. “That is something that worries me every day.” A woman in the front row spoke about the Greeks’ taking “hostages,” and the horror of mourning loved ones without being able to bury their bodies. Another student in the audience talked about “Hamlet” [William Shakespeare (1564-1616); written between 1599 and 1601].

Thirty minutes into the discussion, Shafik, the university president, left. The members of the chorus took note. “There’s a large part of the community who has been wanting to engage in dialogue,” a young woman, who identified herself as Israeli, said. “And it’s not been happening, no matter how many administrators we go to.”

Afterward, Smith ambled out to the lobby and looked for Doerries. He was her ride home. Ninety-three years old, Smith made her film début in 1955, in “East of Eden.” She was full of praise for the students. “There’s been this sense of ‘Oh, it’s so fraught,’” she said. “Thank God it’s not all explosive. There was very much a sense of their thoughtfulness and seriousness.” Doerries found Smith, and the two walked out.

[Eric Lach, a New Yorker staff writer, has contributed to the magazine since 2008.  His column on life in New York City appears regularly on newyorker.com.] 

*  *  *  *
“THEATER OF WAR, A VETERAN-HEALING PERFORMANCE,
IS COMING TO NYC”
by Alex Mitchell 

[Alex Mitchell’s article about Theater of War’s reading of Sophocles’ Ajax to address the issue of suicide among combat veterans was posted to the website of the New York Post on 26 September 2023.]

A profound event that connects to veterans who may be struggling with life at home is coming to Roosevelt Island Wednesday [27 September 2023].

Theater of War Productions, an organization that uses ancient acting to connect with active and former military members, will be performing the ancient Greek tragedy “Ajax” with a star-studded cast at Four Freedoms Park from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The event is free to attend both in person and online.

Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, Bill Camp and Ato Blankson-Wood are some of the lineup slated to read the intense script in front of more than 400 veterans – who have served as early as the Korean War [1950-53] – in addition to Blue Star families [the immediate family members of an active duty service member] and the Special Forces Association.

Although “Ajax” was written by Sophocles [ca. 496-406 BCE] in the 5th century B.C. [ca. 444 BCE], its content is something that even the most modern soldiers can connect with, according to Eduardo Jany, News Corp senior vice president of global security — a company which, in addition to Fox, partners with Theater of War Productions. [Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. also owns the New York Post, the publisher of this article.]

The timeless link is particularly in how the titular Greek warrior, glorified as a mighty hero, spirals after losing his close friend Achilles in the Trojan War. Ensuing trauma leads to his eventual suicide.

“If you listen to the words spoken, you understand how it resonates with modern battle and our lives today,” Jany – a retired Marine colonel who also served in the Army and Special Forces and is reading the role of Agamemnon – told The Post.

“Nothing has changed. There is the same guilty psyche, the worry from family and friends.”

It is the intention of the table-style reading, similar to the 15 years of past runnings from Theater of War Productions, to reach veterans in a way that connects them – along with their families – to unresolved issues brought on by their time in and after service.

“After 30 years in the military, I am aware that emotions often wind up like rocks in a rucksack. Eventually, your knees will buckle if you do not let it out,” Jany said.

A community panel and discussion with those in attendance will occur afterward as a public health tool for attendees. It will begin with raw reactions from Jany, other veterans, and one spouse of a service member.

“That’s when the real performance begins . . . audience members relating those [ancient Greek] lines to often harrowing personal experiences they haven’t shared with people they know, let alone a community that’s coming together to collectively bear witness to them,” Bryan Doerries, Theater of War’s artistic director, told The Post of the many cathartic moments had in front of a community of veterans.

“We’re only now, in the 21st century, rediscovering what the Greeks knew 2,500 years ago — which is that real healing takes place in groups and real healing takes place in the public,” Doerries, who personally translated the text from Greek, added.

Doerries said that he has witnessed firsthand the powerful impacts and uncanny connections that the audience makes after a Theater of War reading.

In many ways, it has saved lives.

“There are people getting up and saying, ‘I was thinking about taking my own life, but I saw myself reflected in the character and now I’m going to pursue a path of healing,’ or ‘I checked myself into a 28-day treatment program for drug and alcohol abuse.’”

While Doerries was quick to commend millenials for bringing a softer conversation on trauma into the open that’s allowed events like Theater of War to succeed, Jany too has seen connections made to the text span generations.

“Older warriors have stood up with tears in their eyes . . . many will see the light bulb go off and say ‘I know what I need to do now,’” he said.

The remarkable healing effect that Theater of War has on service members is, in many ways. why so many celebrity actors — including Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis and Adam Driver [a former Marine] to name a few — were more than willing to sign onto the project in years past.

“If you told me 16 years ago, before I got started, that reading a play for an audience could be of life and death significance for those in attendance, I would say that sounds really exaggerated,” Doerries said.

“But the actors and I know . . . sometimes hearing a play, and seeing an ancient story that reflects your own experiences back to you, can be just a thing that’s needed for someone to begin pursuing a path of healing.”

[There’s no connection of which I know between Doerries and Theater of War, and Scott Mann and The Heroes Journey, creator and producer of Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret (see my post on 10 July 2023), but the rationale for both efforts—to let vets tell their stories—seems to come from the same impulse.

[On 3 September 2023, I posted an article called “Theater: A Healing Art.”  Mann’s Last Out has a prominent place in that discussion, along a with a few other plays and performances.  I didn’t know about Doerries and Theater of War at that time, but it clearly belongs in that effort as well.]

*  *  *  *
“CONFRONTING GRIEF, WITH MARGARET ATWOOD,
IN ‘THE NURSE ANTIGONE’”
by Alisha Haridasani Gupta 

[Alisha Haridasani Gupta’s report in Theater of War’s reading of Antigone for audiences of nurses appeared in the print edition of the New York Times on 16 March 2022.]

A dramatic reading by Theater of War Productions will include the author and practicing nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic.

It was a tragedy — an ancient Greek tragedy — that brought together three nurses on a Zoom call one night last week.

Charlaine Lasse, 55, had rushed home to Bowie, Md., after a 12-hour shift at Anne Arundel Medical Center, propping open her laptop as soon as she got to her dining room table. Also on the call were Amy Smith, 52, a nurse practitioner at Northwell Health-GoHealth Urgent Care in New York who was winding down for the night, and Aliki Argiropoulos, 26, a registered nurse in Baltimore who was studying for an exam.

[Anne Arundel Medical Center is in Annapolis, Maryland, the state capital and the seat of Anne Arundel County. Annapolis is about 20 miles east of Bowie in Prince George’s County and 32 miles south of Baltimore, site of Johns Hopkins University, a renowned private university with highly-rated medical and nursing schools.  Bowie is about 27 miles south of Baltimore.]

After a few technical hiccups and brief introductions, they slipped into character, pretending to be elders in the city of Thebes.

“Oh, Light of the Sun, / more beautiful and / radiant than any rays / that have ever graced / this seven-gated city!” Argiropoulos said, kicking things off.

The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” [441 BCE] that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday [17 March 2022] by Theater of War Productions. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience — a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the [Canadian] author Margaret Atwood [1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale].

Bryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother — Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus — even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive.

“It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.”

While most of the professional actors in this play have worked with Doerries on earlier projects, the addition of Atwood, who is portraying the blind prophet Tiresias, a character that pops up in several of Sophocles’ tragedies first as a man and then as a woman, was a fresh, last-minute addition. When the role opened up, Doerries said he turned to Atwood, who knows a thing or two about prophetic work. Her work, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “just seems so prescient,” he said. “One could see a Gilead easily emerging from the current climate.”

It wasn’t a hard sell. She responded to Doerries over email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing.

“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood — you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand . . . and on the other.’”

The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) — except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.

The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic.

“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses — as the people who are closest to the patient — have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.”

Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 [the ToW website says 2009] to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence.

During the pandemic — as people across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines were thrust into crisis, grief, isolation and sickness — Theater of War Productions pivoted to performances on Zoom, many exploring the “moral suffering of frontline health care workers,” Doerries said.

In May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King” [also by Sophocles; 429-420 BCE], starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.

For that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses.

“I just kept at it like a little chihuahua on your heels, saying, ‘Bryan, the nurses! The nurses!’ We have to find a way to give voice to that experience.”

After the “Antigone” reading, which will be broadcast live to groups of gathered nurses across the country, the actors will be removed from the screen. Lasse, Smith and Argiropoulos will remain to participate in a discussion with three other nurses and to engage with the audience.

Smith, who works in emergency medical care, had worked with Doerries in February as a panelist. Returning as an actor, she said, felt like an opportunity to finally process some of the emotions and themes that she and nurses across the world have been too busy to tackle. “A lot of us, especially in nursing, have to keep moving,” Smith said. “There’s no time to stop and say, ‘Hey, let’s reflect on what just happened.’”

“Hopefully, the play is healing for people,” she said.

[Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a gender reporter for the New York Times, covering politics, business, technology, health and culture through the gender lens.  She writes the “In Her Words” newsletter.

[I have more articles that reveal how Theater of War uses different plays from the classic repertoire to address different issues arising from emotional conflicts among different communities.  I’ll be posting Part 3 of this series on 28 June, reaching further back in ToW’s history.]

'Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story' (Part 2)

 a book by Michael Rosen 

[Susannah Cahalan’s review-cum-sampling of Michael Rosen’s 2015 book ran in the New York Post of 8 February 2015 (https://nypost.com/2015/02/08/the-stories-behind-the-letters-of-our-alphabet/).  A collection of other published articles on Alphabetical was posted on this blog on 1 November.

[Cahalan’s article includes some (26) whimsical illustrations by Leah Tiscione, so I reserved it to post in its own.

[And here it is!]

“THE STORIES BEHIND THE LETTERS OF OUR ALPHABET”
by Susannah Cahalan

G’s that look like I’s, F’s that sound like “Waw,” and Q’s that look like monkeys — man, was our alphabet a mess.

That’s because many of our letters began as Egyptian hieroglyph symbols 4,000 years ago, with a hodgepodge of Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Roman influences thrown in.

It would take centuries, and the dropping of more than a few letters along the way, before our alphabet was born. By year 1011, the order that we know today was largely in place — excluding “J,” “U,” “W” — but there were 29 letters, including the ampersand.

The alphabet we know today takes its modern 26-letter shape in the 16th century.

Author Michael Rosen devotes 400-plus pages to topsy-turvy history of our letters in his entertaining “Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells A Story” (Counterpoint [2015]), dedicating a chapter to each of the 26 letters. Here’s a brief look.

Illustrations by Leah Tiscione

A

Turn the “A” upside down and you’ll have a good sense of its original shape and meaning when it was introduced around 1800 BC. Resembling an animal’s head with antlers or horns, the original meaning of the letter in ancient Semitic was “ox.”

—————————

B

Flip “B” on its belly and you see a home — complete with a door, a room and a roof. Now you have some idea of why 4,000 years ago in Egypt, “B” (which sounded like our “h”) was a hieroglyph that meant “shelter.”

—————————

C 

The first “C” shape emerged in Phoenician and stood for a hunter’s stick or boomerang. The Greeks renamed it “gamma” and when they switched to reading from right to left to left to right in 500 BC, they flipped the shape. As the letter spread to Italy, it took on a more crescent shape, and the C as we know it today was born.

—————————

D

Around 800 BC, Phoenicians began to use a “dalet” — or a rough triangle facing left — which translated to door. The Greeks adopted it and renamed it “delta.” The Romans later added serifs and varied the thickness of the lines, softening one side into a semicircle.

—————————

E

 

The “E” of 3,800 years ago, pronounced “h” in Semitic, resembled a stick with two arms and a leg meant to signify a human form. The Greeks flipped it around in 700 BC and changed the sound to “ee.”

—————————

F 

The “F” of Phoenician times resembled a “Y” and sounded like “waw.” The ancient Greeks changed it to “digamma” and tipped the “Y” over to look like a drunk version of our “F.” The Romans regulated the writing of the letter centuries later, drawing the cross lines at firm geometric right angles, also giving it the “fff” sound.

—————————

G

Today’s “G” derives from the Greek letter “zeta,” a letter that looks like our “I” but was pronounced as a “zzz.” Around 250 BC, Romans altered the shape of this strange letter to look more like an “E” without the middle horizontal arm and then applied the “g” sound because they didn’t need the “z” sound in Latin. Over time, the crescent curved. 

—————————

H

Based on the Egyptian hieroglyph of a fence, it’s one of the most controversial letters in the English language. The breathy sound associated with the letter made academics argue that the letter was unnecessary — and many Latin and British scholars began dropping the “H” in 500 AD. Despite the controversy, “H” secured a spot in our alphabet. 

—————————

I

Around 1000 BC, the letter “I” was “yod,” meaning arm and hand. The Greeks adopted the letter as “iota” changing it to a vertical squiggle. By 700 BC, “I” became the straight line we use today. 

—————————

J 

“I” was a popular letter and often a stand-in for “j” sounds. The red-headed stepchild of our alphabet, “J” was only introduced in standardized spelling in the 15th century by the Spanish and only appeared consistently in print around 1640. 

—————————

K

What appeared to be an outstretched hand with one finger and a thumb visible appeared in Egyptian hieroglyphs around 2000 BC. The ancient Semites called it a “kaph,” meaning “palm of the hand,” which sounded like our “K.” Around 800 BC, the Greeks reversed it and took it on as their own “kappa.” 

—————————

L 

A hook-shaped letter, referred to as “El,” meaning “God” emerged in ancient Semitic inscriptions around 1800 BC. The Phoenicians straightened out the hook, reversed its position, and called it “lamed” (“lah-med”), meaning a cattle prod. Again the Greeks flipped the letter and renamed it “lamda.” The Romans straightened the bottom leg into a right angle. 

—————————

M 

Four-thousand years ago, Egyptians drew a vertical wavy line with five peaks to denote “water.” The Semites reduced the number of waves to three in 1800 BC; the Phoenicians continued the trend by removing one more wave. By 800 BC, the peaks became zigzags and the structure was made horizontal — our “M” in sound and appearance. 

—————————

N

Around the same time as “M,” “N” was emerging in Egypt with a small ripple on top and a larger one below. The word translated to “snake” or “cobra.” Ancient Semites gave it the sound “n,” meaning fish. By around 1000 BC, the sign contained just one wave and was named “nu” by the Greeks. 

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O

“O” starts its life on Egyptian hieroglyphs (around the time as “M” and “N”) as “eye.” Semites called it “ayin” but with a guttural sound that sounds like “ch” (think Hebrew name Chaim). The Phoenicians reduced the eye to just the outline of a pupil, our “O.” 

—————————

P 

An inverted “V”-shape appears in early Semitic language 3,800 years ago, sounding like “pe” and meaning “mouth.” The Phoenicians adapted it to a diagonal hook shape at the top. The Romans closed the loop, and flipped it right, by 200 BC. 

—————————

Q 

Around 1000 BC, “Q,” which sounded like “qoph,” either meant ”monkey” or a “ball of wool.” According to Rosen, academics are still split. “Q” was then a circle with a vertical line through it. A “Q” that we’d recognize appeared in Roman inscriptions in 520 BC — it was also then that the “u after q” rule was invented.

—————————

R 

“R” first appears in ancient Semitic in the form of a profile of a human. Pronounced “resh” it translated to (no surprise) “head.” The Romans flipped it to face right and added a tail, “probably to distinguish it from ‘P’,” writes Rosen. 

—————————

S 

Early “S’s” appeared 3,600 years ago as a horizontal, curvy “W” shape, meant to denote an archer’s bow. Phoenicians added an angularity that looks more like our “W’s” At this stage it was known as “shin” meaning “tooth.” The early Greeks rotated it to the vertical and called it “sigma” with the “s” sound — and the Romans flipped it. 

—————————

T 

“T” in its modern, lower-case form, is found all over ancient Semitic inscriptions. By 1000 BC, the Phoenicians referred to it as “taw,” meaning “mark,” with our current “tee” sound. The Greeks named it “tau” and added a cross stroke at the top to differentiate it from “X.” 

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U 

There’s a lot of confusion among letters “U,” “V” and “W.” According to Rosen, the Phoenicians began using a letter that looked like our “Y” around 1000 BC. They called it “waw” meaning “peg.” The Greeks adopted this in 700 BC and called it “upsilon.” 

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V 

The Romans did not differentiate between “V” and “U” sounds — so Venus was actually pronounced “Weenus.” Even Shakespeare used “U’s” in place of “V’s” in his plays and poems. Capital “V’s” at the start of words started to appear in the 1400s. 

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W 

During the Middle Ages, Charlemagne’s scribes placed two “U’s” side by side with a space between (as in literally “double U”), a new letter that sounded like a “V.” It wasn’t until around 1700 that W as a unique letter (not two “U’s” or two “V’s” placed side-by-side) emerged in printing presses across Europe. In French, this letter is still referred to as “double V.” 

—————————

X 

The ancient Greeks had a letter “ksi” which sounded like our “X.” Lower case “x’s” arrive via handwritten manuscripts of early medieval times and the Italian printers of the late 15th century. 

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Y 

The original “Y” entered the alphabet as “upsilon” or our “U.” Around 100 AD Romans added “Y” to their alphabet, usually to denote something of Greek origins. 

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Z 

“Z” might be the last letter of the alphabet, but it’s an elder. Three-thousand years ago the Phoenicians used a letter called “zayin,” meaning “ax.” It looked like an uppercase “I” with top and bottom serifs. The Greeks adopted it as “zeta” around 800 BC, when it evolved into our modern “Z” shape (and also led to the creation of our “G”) with the sound of “dz.” The letter fell into disuse for several centuries, until the Norman French arrived with words that used the “Z” sound. 

What didn’t make the cut

It took thousands of years to establish our 26-letter alphabet. As we formed our modern language, we lost a few letters, including:

Thorn: þ
This letter — which was pronounced “th” as in “them” and translated to “the” — took the place of “ye” in place names like “Ye Olde Fishe and Chippe Shoppe.” Over time, as Gothic script was introduced to Old English, “Y” and “thorn” looked too similar — and one had to go.

Wynn: ƿ
Latin didn’t offer a letter with the “wah” sound popular to English speakers. Wynn filled the void, but not for long. Over time, it became popular to stick two double-“U’s” side-by-side to create the sound of wynn.

Yogh: Ȝ
The yogh sound entered during the Middle English to represent the “ch” sound (think: Bach). It disappeared thanks to the French printing presses, which decided to replace yogh with “gh.”

Ash: ӕ
You’ve seen it in medieval (when spelled mediaeval) or in aeon and aether. This is an example of Roman ligature, meaning the tying together of two letters, in this case “a” and “e.” Though it was dropped as a letter from English, it remains one in Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic.

Ethel: œ
Another Latin ligature, this is the combination of “o” and “e” that can be seen in words like “foetus” and “subpoena.” Now in most cases, we replace this letter with an e.

Ampersand: &
Though Rosen does not include this in his book, because he says “pedantically and fussily” that it’s a symbol, not a letter. But the ampersand was once considered part of the alphabet. In fact, that’s how it got its name. The end of the alphabet was “x, y, z and, per se, and.” That is, “in itself, and,” meaning the symbol for “and.” That became am-per-sand.

[Susannah Cahalan is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and public speaker.  Her 2012 memoir, Brain on Fire (written with Souhel Najjar, a Syrian-American neurologist) has sold over a million copies and was made into a 2016 Netflix original movie.  Her second book, The Great Pretender (2019), made an array of “Best-Of” lists and was shortlisted for the 2020 Royal Society’s Science Book Award.  She’s written for the New York Times, the New York Post, Elle, The New Scientist, and BBC Focus (later BBC Science Focus), as well as academic journals The Lancet and Biological Psychiatry.

[I had intended to insert samples of the characters and proto-letters to which Rosen and Cahalan referred in the book and article, but while some of the figures were simply special characters that Word (which is what I create my initial copy with) can print—and most likely that Blogger can reproduce—many others were “images,” or tiny pictures which don’t transfer so easily and with which I feared I’d have trouble on Blogger.  So, unhappily, I dropped the idea.

[I can only add that most of the alphabets, proto-alphabets, and writing systems on which Rosen based his analysis are available on the ’Net and readers can find them (many are reproduced in various entries on Wikipedia) and see to what Rosen and Cahalan are referring in their comparisons.  That’s a more time-consuming and effortful chore than a comparison would have been if I’d been able to include the samples in the post as I wished, but circumstances have prevented that.  I can but apologize to ROTters.]

“Dante update neither divine nor comedy”

by Kyle Smith

[After the Johnny Knoxville movie Jackass 3D hit theaters on Friday, 15 October, my friend Kirk Woodward alerted me to Kyle Smith’s review in the New York Post. As I don’t read the Post regularly, I’d never have caught this review, particularly since the Jackass movies (this is the third, not counting the TV series) aren’t of much interest to me so I wouldn’t have made a survey of the critical reception the film received in the media. If Kirk hadn’t recommended that I have a look at Smith’s review because “in all our discussion of reviews, here’s something I think we didn’t expect,” I’d have missed something really quite wonderful.

[Readers of ROT will know that Kirk is the author of The Art of Writing Reviews on which I commented at length (“The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Parts 1-4,” 4, 8, 11, 14 November 2009). In addition to my commentary on Kirk’s book, I, too, have written about reviewing and reviewers, notably in “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009. Neither Kirk nor I, as he noted, anticipated an approach like Smith’s. I'm just guessing, of course, but I got the sense that Smith didn't really want to review Jackass. It's his job and he was handed the assignment, so he couldn't just blow it off, and writing a "serious" review would have been dull--both to do and to read, I imagine. I mean, what can you say about a movie that plays to the absolute lowest taste and intellect? No one really cares how this movie is reviewed: the people who like the Jackass flicks aren't going to care if some newspaper writer doesn't like it, and the people who share his opinion aren't going to go to it anyway. So what's the point? But Smith found a way to do something interesting while still fulfilling his responsibility: telling us what he thought about the movie. There’s a lesson here for all writers, including students, who are required to write about something in which they find little of interest or value. In that spirit, I’m reprinting Smiths review as it was posted on the New York Post’s website on 14 October (and published in the paper the next day). ~Rick]

When Dante ("Inferno," Canto XXII) wrote that "the captain made a trumpet of his ass," he could not have known how shamelessly he would be ripped off by "Jackass 3D," which shows a guy not only playing a trumpet out of his butt but also deploying his sphincter to blow up a balloon and tootle a party streamer.

Johnny Knoxville is fond of strenuous dumb-dude laughter (each segment features a few seconds of stunts followed by a long interlude of Johnny and his boys standing around whooping it up – the movie comes with its own laugh track). The idiocy is just an act.

Knoxville would never admit to such loser taste, but he and his friends are obviously scholars of "The Divine Comedy," from which they plagiarized all of their ideas and disguised them as silly stunts to infect the minds of American youth with 14th-century epic poetry. It's time someone called him out on this insidious campaign; why can't movies be mindless entertainment free of subversive educational agendas?

Consider: Both Dante and Knoxville are about halfway through life, each starring as narrators playing themselves. "I'm Johnny Knoxville." "I'm Johnny Knoxville. I'm Johnny Knoxville." What kind of film has its main character keep introducing himself? It cannot be that Johnny considers his viewers so deep-fried of brain that they forget who he is every five minutes. No, it's a clear parallel with Dante – who mentions himself even more times than Johnny.

A line from Canto I of "Inferno" could be used as the tagline for "Jackass 3D": "You shall hear the howls of desperation . . . as each of them laments." Dante's " 'Tis true I said to him in jest/that I could rise by flight into the air" (Canto XXIX) leads directly to Knoxville riding a Jet Ski up a ramp and flying into a hedge. Dante is tormented by a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf; Knoxville gets head-butted by a buffalo, a ram, a bull. Dante "entered on the deep and savage way" to get closer to God; Knoxville's journey leads to a climactic scene with a deity from the holy trinity of "The Gong Show" – Rip Taylor.

"The Divine Comedy" deals in poetic justice; in "Jackass 3D," a guy who thinks he is going to prank a friend (the sin of treachery!) is himself pranked by his friends – and subjected to his worst fear, being trapped in a snakepit.

A corpulent man – a human hog, you might say – is victimized by a real hog who gleefully consumes an apple placed in the glutton's ample pink buttocks.

The vainglorious Steve-O, proud of his bare, gym-built, copiously tattoo-decorated torso ("even the French can't match such vanity" – Canto XXIX) will find himself bungee-jumping inside a portable toilet. The outcome? Take it away, Canto XVIII: "I saw souls in the ditch plunged into excrement that might well have been flushed from our latrines . . . I saw somebody's head so smirched with s - - t, you could not tell if he were priest or layman."

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of "Jackass 3D" has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

[What gets me most here is how Smith, even while taking a humorous approach that clearly is meant to make fun of the movie itself, still manages to tell us what he thinks of it (even though, until the last sentence, he doesn’t directly state his opinion). I especially like the part where Smith upbraids Hollywood for sneaking in so much surreptitious education. It’s delicious—and effective—use of irony. I'm not familiar enough with Divine Comedy to be sure Smith got all his refs right, but I'll bet he has, and the parallels he constructs, not entirely tortured, are terrific. So are the parallels he finds between Knoxville and Dante themselves. I think this may be one of the best reviews of a bad movie (in the opinion of the reviewer, of course) I've ever seen. I don’t know Smith’s writing, but I tip my hat to him as a writer and as a reviewer.]

A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt

Between September 1996 and September 1997, I was engaged in extensive research on Tennessee Williams’s plays Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale for a forthcoming reference book, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Toward the end of this work, I consulted the chapter on Summer and Smoke of Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan (1961) in which Nancy M. Tischler quotes a letter that she asserts Williams wrote to columnist Irving Hoffman of The Hollywood Reporter. She cites the playwright's complaint of the “exorbitant demands which are made by critics who don’t stop to consider the playwright’s need for a gradual ripening or development . . . a degree of tolerance and patience in his mentors during this period of transition.” Williams blamed the critics for the “failure of Summer and Smoke” on Broadway in 1948, Tischler states, and was “crushed” that they had “turned against him” after their support of The Glass Menagerie. She quotes Williams further:

Painters have it better. They are allowed to evolve new methods, new styles, by a reasonable gradual process [sic]. They are not abused for turning out creative variations of themes already stated. If a certain theme has importance, it may take a number of individual works to explore it fully. . . . It would help enormously if there were professional theatre centers outside of New York, so that the playwright would not always be at the mercy of a single localized group.

Seven years later, J. William Miller also quotes some of these same passages in Modern Playwrights at Work, directly connecting the letter to Williams’s bitterness about the reception of Summer and Smoke. I felt that I ought to see the whole letter in case it revealed information about Summer and Smoke useful to my research, so I began to look for it.

Williams’s “wrath broke into print,” writes Tischler, and Miller asserts Williams “denounced the critics . . . in a letter in Irving Hoffman’s column, ‘Tales of Hoffman’. . . ,” indicating that the columnist had published the letter. Neither Tischler nor Miller, however, give the precise source of the letter, published or otherwise, and no other writer quotes the letter, though a few refer to it. The only Williams bibliography that even mentions the letter, George W. Crandell’s Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography, does so as part of the description of Miller’s book; no other reference work lists a letter to Hoffman or any column by Hoffman in which it might have been printed. Other references to the letter--for example, Signi Falk’s Tennessee Williams--cite Tischler’s book, not any primary source. Neither the letter nor any mention of it is in any file at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Billy Rose Theatre Collection, including files and scrapbooks on Williams, Summer and Smoke, The Hollywood Reporter, or Irving Hoffman.

I was certain that if one of America’s most famous playwrights, the winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize in drama (for A Streetcar Named Desire), had written such a bitter, complaining letter to a Hollywood gossip columnist, Hoffman would have published it immediately. That was his job, after all. Taking as my only lead the facts that Williams had written the letter after Summer and Smoke opened on Broadway on 6 October 1948, that the reviews began to appear on 7 October, that Williams had left for North Africa in December, and that Summer and Smoke had closed on 1 January 1949, I began searching through back issues of The Hollywood Reporter for that period at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Nothing turned up, however, in Hoffman’s daily column. I had noticed, though, that the issue of 13 October contained no “Tales of Hoffman,” so I flipped back to see why. I found that the issue had been mutilated--someone had slit out the page on which Hoffman’s column always appeared. Because this was just about a week after Hoffman’s own review of Summer and Smoke had appeared (7 October), and because I had run into previous instances of material pertaining to Tennessee Williams having been similarly removed from books and journals, I was convinced that this column contained the elusive letter and had been cut out by a souvenir-hunting researcher.

I set about in search of a complete copy of the 13 October 1948 Hollywood Reporter, but no one in New York City had back issues that old. I could not obtain a copy of the issue or the column in question through interlibrary loan or any other process, including a pleading letter fired off to the Los Angeles Public Library, so it took me months--until I was in Washington and paid a visit to the Library of Congress--to discover that my deduction had been wrong. “Tales of Hoffman” was there, all right, but it dealt with something entirely unrelated to Williams or Summer and Smoke. That left me with no clue to when this letter might have been written or published. I contacted The Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles directly in the hope that they kept an archive or maintained an in-house index, but they had no records or archives at all and could not help. My only recourse was to conduct an issue-by-issue search, so on subsequent trips to Lincoln Center on other business, I usually requested additional volumes of The Hollywood Reporter (which are stored off site and require a delivery request in advance) and browsed through Hoffman’s columns one by one, a few volumes at a time. I went up through the end of 1950 before I decided that Williams was unlikely to have written a letter about Summer and Smoke so long after it had closed, and gave up looking. My deadline had arrived some time before this, and I had sent off my copy to my editor without ever seeing the letter, but my scholarly curiosity was still piqued.

A few months later, frustrated that I had failed to find this elusive document, I attempted to locate the letter in the various Tennessee Williams archival collections around the country. I wrote to all of them that I could identify, but those that responded said they had no record of such a letter and could find no reference to it in their files. On a whim, I decided to try to track down Tischler, and found that she was on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University. (It turned out that she had retired a few months earlier but, after several abortive attempts, my letter to her was eventually forwarded.) After I reached her, Tischler wrote me that she could not locate a copy of the Hoffman letter or remember where she had originally seen it. She surmised that she may have learned about the letter in an interview, presumably of Williams, “back in the fifties.” She was, however, in the process of editing a collection of Williams’s letters for publication, and she had on hand a letter Williams wrote to New York Post columnist Max Lerner. She sent me an excerpt from this letter, written on 21 March 1951, which had language identical to that quoted in both her book and Miller’s. Tischler suggested that Williams may have quoted his own letter to Hoffman when he wrote a similar one to Lerner. From this suggestion, I determined that the letter to Hoffman would have had to appear in The Hollywood Reporter a little before he wrote to Lerner, so I once again leafed through back issues, from the date in 1950 when I had previously left off up to May 1951, the end of the bound volume that contained March. There was no letter from Williams, and I again assumed I had come to a dead end. I was ready to argue that Williams never wrote to Hoffman at all, that Tischler had made a mistake or been misled, possibly in that interview with Williams in the 1950s, and that Miller, using Rebellious Puritan as his source, had perpetuated Tischler’s error.

A week or so later, I had an opportunity to look up Max Lerner in one of the Williams bibliographies, John S. McCann’s The Critical Reputation of Tennessee Williams: A Reference Guide, which are in a different building in a different part of Manhattan from the Theatre Collection, and found that he had written a New York Post column on 16 May 1951 called “Letter From A Playwright.” The description matched the letter whose excerpt Tischler had sent me. I found the column--in yet another New York Public Library facility--and, indeed, it was the same letter from which Tischler had sent me the excerpt, and was identical in every way to the passages quoted in her book and Miller’s. As far as I was concerned, this was unquestionably the letter from which Tischler and Miller had drawn the quotations and that someone had erred regarding the attribution.

(Ironically, a clipping of this column is in one of the Tennessee Williams files at the Billy Rose Collection, but as it is under Lerner’s byline in the 1950-1956 folder--and in bad condition; I never would have located it, or recognized it if I had found it. I was still looking for an Irving Hoffman column from 1948-1949 concerning Summer and Smoke. I found the clipping in the Williams file much later, after I already knew what it was. The fact that the New York Public Library theater files, including The Hollywood Reporter, are in the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center at 65th Street and Broadway--which covers productions but not plays and playwrights, which are considered literature in NYPL’s taxonomy; the two books in question here and the newspapers on microfilm are in the History and Social Sciences Library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue--where the materials on literature, including playwrights, are housed; and the bibliographies are in the Mid-Manhattan Branch at 40th Street and 5th--the main circulating branch containing the largest literary reference collection outside HSSL--helped protract my search. This accounted for my having searched The Hollywood Reporter after learning of the Williams-Lerner letter but before locating Lerner’s column. As a result, I searched the wrong issues of The Hollywood Reporter for the Hoffman column that I eventually found, delaying the discovery about a week.)

The text of the letter Lerner published in his New York Post column contains language identical to that quoted first by Tischler and then by Miller. Except for the switch from the Post’s American spelling of ‘theater’ to Tischler’s British ‘theatre,’ both she and Miller reproduce sections of this letter exactly, including the strange grammatical construction “reasonable gradual process,” instead of “reasonably gradual process.” It seemed odd that Williams, a poet and a playwright renowned for his lyrical language, would write such an awkward phrase. It was even odder that, if he had rewritten the same letter first to Irving Hoffman and then to Max Lerner, that he would repeat this infelicitous wording. It is well known that Williams was an inveterate rewriter: all his plays exist in several versions, the products of his constant revising. It turns out that he also does this with his correspondence. Tischler sent me an earlier version of the letter Williams wrote to Lerner, this one dated 19 March, which contains very different language from that in the 21 March letter. It also became obvious, once I saw the entire letter and the column in which Lerner published it, that Williams had written it specifically to Lerner. It also clearly had nothing to do with Summer and Smoke, which both Tischler and Miller maintain and which assertion set me on the search to begin with. The columnist had written an earlier piece entitled “Number One Boy” (6 March 1951) in which he used the recently-opened Rose Tattoo “as a jumping-off point” to discuss the critical treatment of successful artists. In his preface to Williams’s letter, Lerner explained, “I pointed out that we generally have some leading playwright who is our Number One Boy.” In that first column, which is oddly also absent from the major bibliographies of Williams despite its discussion of both the playwright and The Rose Tattoo (which had opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on 3 February 1951), Lerner had written:

Every play of theirs must be a hit, every effort must strike twelve and keep chiming even beyond that. If they once falter, it is a sign of inner decay. There are few areas where the pressures on the successful are as merciless as in writing for Broadway. . . . But every one seems grimly to set standards for the Number One Boy to fulfill.

Wolfe Kaufman, press agent for Rose Tattoo producer Cheryl Crawford and the press representative for the play, had sent “Number One Boy” to Williams in Key West. (Apparently, Lerner also sent Williams his column, but it arrived after Kaufman’s clipping.) The playwright responded enthusiastically to Lerner’s opinions, which he saw as a reflection of his own, even though Lerner thought The Rose Tattoo was “overrated” by most critics (and “underrated” by “one or two” others). The letter that Lerner published on 16 May, and which Tischler and Miller quote, was not a letter discussing general ideas that Williams might have sent off to several correspondents. “I think that you, for the first time to my knowledge, have placed your finger directly on the most demoralizing problem that the American playwright has to face,” applauded Williams early in his letter (the emphasis is mine). He later added, “As far as I know, you are the first to reflect in print on the exorbitant demands made by critics . . . .” This very unambiguously speaks directly to Lerner about ideas he, alone, raised in “Number One Boy.”

All this suggested to me that Lerner’s column, not anything by Hoffman, was the source for the letter, that Williams wrote it to Lerner, not Hoffman, and that he had probably not copied his own letter and sent it to a second correspondent. The truth is very simple, as it turns out. Ironically, had I requested one more volume of The Hollywood Reporter and paged through the May issues, I would have uncovered it weeks earlier.

Just to be certain that Hoffman did not publish a similar letter from Williams, now that I knew when Lerner had published his, I did search further into back issues of The Hollywood Reporter. There it was at last! On 23 May 1951, Hoffman had reprinted Lerner’s entire Post column under the subtitle “Letterature.” Williams had, indeed, never written this letter to Hoffman; he wrote only to Lerner. Hoffman, like a good gossip columnist, simply reran something of interest to his readers from another writer’s column, spreading the news. Hoffman clearly gave Lerner full credit: “Post columnist Max Lerner published the following in his syndicated column last week. I thought you’d be interested in it, so I reprint.”

So the chronology of the elusive Tennessee Williams letter is thus:

• 3 February 1951: The Rose Tattoo opens on Broadway.

• 6 March: Max Lerner writes “Number One Boy,” a column about Rose Tattoo.

• Between 6 and ca. 16 March: Wolfe Kaufman sends Lerner’s column to Tennessee Williams. Later Lerner sends a copy, too.

• 19 March: Williams drafts an appreciative letter to Lerner. 21 March: composes a final version which he sends the columnist.

• 16 May: Lerner publishes Williams’s letter in a New York Post column called “Letter From A Playwright.”

• 23 May: Irving Hoffman republishes Lerner’s New York Post column with Williams’s letter in his Hollywood Reporter column, “Tales of Hoffman,” under the subtitle “Letterature.”

• 1961: Nancy Tischler publishes Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, the first book-length study of Williams’s work. She cites Williams’s letter in the chapter on Summer and Smoke, writing that the playwright wrote it to Hoffman.

• 1968: J. William Miller publishes Modern Playwrights at Work and cites the Williams letter, repeating Tischler’s assertions.

• 1998: After 37 years of references continuing to cite the erroneous origin of the letter, the facts are sorted out.

• 11 April 2009: This writing is the first public attempt to correct the record.

Clearly, this resolves the confusion over the “missing” Williams-Hoffman letter and explains why no bibliography or library had any record of it: that letter does not exist. Tischler’s attribution of the letter to Hoffman was probably the result of an erroneous reference to his 23 May Hollywood Reporter column as the original source of what was actually the 21 March Williams-Lerner letter, first published in the New York Post on 16 May. Unfortunately, because of the second publication of the letter--and possibly influenced by something Williams had told her--Tischler cited it as one Williams sent to Hoffman and Miller picked up her mistake and restated it in his book. Why the letter, regardless of its recipient, was linked to Summer and Smoke is not clear. Tischler properly points out in a letter to me that “the issues . . . were continuing concerns for Williams,” but he did not write the letter until over two years after Summer and Smoke closed. Nevertheless, later writers accepted these assertions and, with no primary source to consult, gave Tischler or Miller as the provenience. Once published, the misattribution became “fact” and part of the record. Of course, the original source should have been the letter Williams wrote Lerner on 21 March 1951, or Lerner’s 16 May New York Post column.

Altogether, this search took eight months, though it was far from a full-time pursuit, particularly after my Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale copy had been submitted in November 1997. I continued to search for the letter in the hope that, if it turned out to be relevant, I might be able to slip a mention of it into the chapter in proofs. It is also fair to say that I wanted to pin down this reference for the scholarly satisfaction of getting it on the record somehow. All my efforts and deductions--most of which turned out to be wrong--would have been for naught, however, had I not reached Nancy Tischler and had she not provided me with the final clue to the whereabouts of, first, Lerner’s New York Post column and, then, the Hoffman column that followed from it. It is ironic that my search--which has ended up being no more than a scholarly treasure hunt since it was irrelevant to Summer and Smoke, my research subject--began with Tischler’s 1961 book and ended with her 1998 project, the publication of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. (If she had not been working on the letters, she would not have had Williams’s letter to Lerner at hand.) Tischler, as it were, initiated my frustration and then resolved it. It is also ironic that, though Tischler and I had been in correspondence over this letter and all it engendered, we had spoken by telephone only once and had never met until June 1999, when she came to New York City to see Not About Nightingales on Broadway.